It feels a bit eery to carry a book about Martin Luther King, Jr. around the city where he died, but during a trip to Memphis last weekend, I had the pleasure of reading Edward Gilbreath’s Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epic Challenge to the Church. It’s given me plenty to think about, enough that I want … More Birmingham Revolution: MLK’s “Great Epistle to the Church”
In my day job as a history professor, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past week investigating the experience of immigrants during World War I. And since most of the faculty and students at Bethel in 1917-18 were either born in Sweden themselves or the children or grandchildren of such immigrants, I’ve also been thinking about my own … More What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church? “An Immigrant Church”
7/5/14 – I’ll be traveling again this weekend, so we’ll take a week off from our usual Saturday links post. But if you don’t quite know what to do with the extra time, I’d strongly recommended you check out my summer blogging project, Bethel at War, 1914-2014, where this past week I wrote about everything from nativism … More No Links This Morning
So what’s this small but fast-growing denomination called the Evangelical Covenant Church? When I asked Facebook friends from the Covenant to suggest a sentence or two, I received several suggestions. I won’t repeat them all, but two common themes emerged. Most everyone appealed to figures or slogans from European history, and they described the Covenant as a group of people, … More What’s the Evangelical Covenant Church? “Missional Pietists”
The first month of summer break is coming to an end, so it seems like a good time to check in on the progress of the digital history project that I’m working on with my student Fletcher Warren: We’re researching how the people of Bethel University have experienced a century of warfare going back to 1914, the year … More “Preargument Scholarship”: Blogging Our Digital History Project
For longer than I want to admit, Mark Norris, my colleague in the History Department at Grace College, and I have been working to pull together an edited volume on the history of our institution. We know that institutional histories don’t often represent the best in critical scholarship and are often assumed to be merely … More Examining Institutional Memory
Given my occupation, this title may suggest a one-line post: I studied history in college; I teach history at a college. But I rarely draw very much on the historical knowledge I acquired from the fine professors of the William & Mary history department. I did take a lot of modern European history courses there, but I suspect that the content of my … More Why I’m Glad I Majored in History
I thoroughly enjoyed the first two biennial meetings of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) that I attended, at Bluffton University in 2008 and Gordon College in 2012. But I’m even more excited to take part in the 2014 meeting this September at Pepperdine University. And not just because Malibu is a bit more attractive … More CFH 2014: Christian Historians, Social Media, and Institutional Change
Seventy years ago today, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy — opening the long-promised “second front” in the European experience of World War II and ultimately sealing the fate of the Third Reich. There’s plenty of coverage of the anniversary — let me just suggest a few links: • The Washington Post has a striking photo … More D-Day at 70
Over at Slate writer Ben Schreckinger argues that the seven-day week has outlived its usefulness: The pattern of living on a seven-day cycle—with one or two of those days set aside for rest—is a relative novelty. Only in the past few centuries, with Western colonization of most of the world, have the majority of human societies adopted it. … More The Week Is Dead, Long Live the Week!
The Pietist Schoolman 